Paris bulletin 5 2010

The temperature is already soaring into the 20s as I sit here at the open window looking out from time to time at the chantier across the rooftops. The new build is close to completion. Perhaps by the time I come back there’ll be washing flapping at the windows and mats hanging over the balconies. The lilac tree on the rooftop garden off to my left is weighed down with purple blossom and I can see two blackbirds sparring on the grass.

Paris kids are finally having their Easter holiday. They’ve had to wait for it because of the way l’Education nationale organises school holidays. Paris is in C group this year, along with Bordeaux. But on Friday Parisians started pouring out of the city, though not by air or even as much as they might have liked, by train. The volcano was the reason for the absence de vols, an SNCF strike for that of the trains. The rail strike is now in its 12th day and, apart from in Marseille shows no sign of winding down.

As the French clear off the tourists flood in – nature abhors a vacuum. The pavements I reported as filling up with beggars have now got even more crowded with thousands of young people trooping round after weary-looking adults holding up flags or papers for them to follow. I watched a couple of Canorama boats negotiate the locks on the canal St Martin the other day. No-one inside seemed to be in the least interested or excited by the experience of being dropped down several metres to lower levels of water. You wonder why people pay to go on these trips – perhaps it’s just to take the picture, fill in the time, so you can go back and say you did it…

The Louvre and the musée d’Orsay will be bursting at the seams but you can still find places to look at pictures which are not. One such is the museum housing Gustave Moreau’s works which is on the rue de la Rochefoucauld, in the 9^th arrondissement. Unlike the Louvre and the musée d’Orsay this is privately-run and well-off the usual tourist trail. Moreau, who was around in the mid to late 19^th century and taught among others, Rouault and Matisse, lived all his life in this house which he eventually partially converted into a museum to hold his work. If you visit – and I recommend it – you go through the living rooms on the first floor, little rooms stuffed with furniture and bibelots, and up beyond these to a high-ceilinged, north-lit space hung with his huge oils, other-worldly, steeped in myths and dreams. A spiral staircase at one end takes you up a further level to yet more of the same.

Moreau’s museum is something of an exception in Paris, where most of the big art galleries and musées are run either directly by the central state or by the mairie de Paris, the town hall. The Opéra and some of the biggest theatres are also state-owned and run. La Comédie Française, le Théâtre de l’Odéon, le Théâtre de la Colline and le Théâtre national de Chaillot are all public institutions. Then there are the commercial theatres on the grands boulevards, with their big-name actors and long runs. And tucked away in all sorts of odd corners, the small, ‘experimental’ theatres, the glory of Parisian cultural life in the old days. It was in theatres like that on the Left Bank that I first saw plays by Beckett and Ionesco and only last year, Dominique Blanc in ‘La douleur’ by Duras, at le théâtre de l’Atelier.

Not all private theatres have a team of ‘ouvreuses’ but many still do. They are the women and men whose job it is to seat people and keep an eye on the audience. You used to get them in cinemas as well but no longer. There’s quite often a sign in the foyer of the theatres that use ouvreuses – ‘notre personnel est payé au pourboire. Ils vous remercient d’avance de votre générosité’ or words like that. (‘Our staff are paid by their tips. Thank you for your generosity’).

I heard one of the ouvreuses in the Théatre des Champs Elysées being interviewed recently – ‘….Je sais tout de suite qui va me récompenser correctement et qui va essayer de rien donner. Il y a toujours quelqu’un qui vous dit, ‘désolé, Madame, je n’ai pas de monnaie’. Mais je ne bouge pas. Je leur dis tout simplement, ça fait rien monsieur, j’accepte les billets aussi.’

(…. I can tell straight off who’s going to give me a decent tip and who’s not. There’s always someone who says, ‘I’m dreadfully sorry. I’ve no change’. If they do, I say, ‘No problem – I take notes as well as coins.’)

No pay at all, except what your rows of audience are prepared to give you. Small pickings to take home if the theatre’s half empty. So if ever you find yourself being escorted to your seat in a Paris theatre give generously – you’ll be making up for the skinflint in the seat next to you and the empty seats two rows back, both of which represent ‘un sérieux manque à gagner’ (loss of earnings), for your ouvreuse.